Author
Topic: Bee identification (Read 580 times)

I was thinking about last summer while driving to work this morning and recalled something I had never asked about, but am quite curious about nonetheless! In my garden I grew many things, including corn. Now, my Italian bees never went near the corn plants, but there were always these other bees on them collecting loads of pollen! They looked like honey bees, but they were very, very dark. Almost black. My question is, what type of bee do you think it may have been? Some other breed of honey bee? or something else completely? In all the reading I've done, I have never heard anyone mention "corn" as a bee plant!

Well might just be my uneducated self, but.....Last summer, end of season, I noted my free standing feeders had bees that were almost black among them. Most were very dark. When filling the feeder, I noticed that the bees that were feeding (just yesterday) were mostly, but not all, very yellow, so yellow my first look was followed by a double take to make sure it wasn't hornets.

As I watched longer, there were very black bees and very yellow bees coming out of the hive, nothing between. I am assuming, not positive, that the black bees are older and the yellow are very young. Mind you this is only one of my hives. The other one, the few times I have seen them venturing out the colors are what I saw last year in that hive. My assumption is as they get older they darken, at least in that hive which is my strongest.

if the hive has a new queen she may have mated with various types of drones. carniolans can appear black and most of the feral bees in my area used to be black. i have a few hives that have "mixed" workers. older workers that were yellow will still be yellow but have smooth, hairless abdomens.

Thanks for your input. I have a package of Carniolans ordered for the end of March. So, I can compare them to the Italians. Perhaps different breeds of honey bees have different preferences for where the forage. I imagine just like people, they can have different tastes.